On everything? Really. Have we thought about it?

On life. Should I want to live life king size at all costs and be ready to do whatever may be required for it? Or should I be ready to draw a line somewhere and stay within that for my own heart’s sake?

On work. Should I compete with all others and do everything that’s required to reach the summit? Or should I balance things with a perspective of reaching where I intend to reach, without considering myself in a race?

On relationships. Should I do everything to take care of my relationships and maintain them, come what may? Or should I accept the strain or tension that some of them may imply, either vitiating myself or severing those ties, if it ever comes to that?

On health. Should I adopt habits that help me take care of myself for years to come and be conscious of my lifestyle choices even at the expense of my happiness? Or should I not worry too much about it and enjoy things that I like and live as I want to, postponing the worries to sometime in the future.

On wealth. Should I focus on earning more and saving more to ensure I can live comfortably later on? Or should I spend on things I want right now and assume the future will sort itself out and we will cross the bridge when we get there.

On ethics. Should I always have a upright stance on everything and morally do the right thing, even if it lands me in trouble or pulls me back? Or should I be ok to tweak things a bit to benefit myself in the spirit of being always successful?

On feelings. Should I be straight forward with them and let them be visible to others, even in difficult times? Or should I hide my true self from the world and put on a game face if required?

These are all difficult questions. Perhaps with no right answer.

This week, as I went through life in the wake of the new year, some of these thoughts occurred to me. Not in terms of making decisions about these points myself but generally, as something that I haven’t thought about explicitly.

Yet as I reflected more, I realized that most of us make one or the other choice on these spectrums in different points in our life. Some of these choices are made explicitly and some implicitly.

What matters is the understanding of the mechanism we use to make these choices – the inner workings of our head and our heart, combined with our circumstances and the atmosphere around us. Along with complete ownership of our decision and consciousness about our choices.

For that helps us be truthful about whether the choice we made was right or wrong, depending on the results and the path it led us to. And more importantly, allows us the freedom within to not be trapped eternally within those choices but to make corrections if needed or choose the next fork in our life’s journey…